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Sylvain Forest

Age: 48
Occupation: government employee
Number of Cruises: 7
Cruise Line: Norwegian Cruise Lines
Ship: Norwegian Sun
Sailing Date: December 7th, 2003
Itinerary: Western Caribbean

My wife and I sailed for a 7-day Western Caribbean cruise on the Norwegian Sun on December 7, 2003 from Miami. We are both in our late fourties. This was our 7th cruise, having previously sailed 3 times with RCI, and once each with Celebrity, Holland America and NCL. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves on the Norwegian Sun. I’ll cut right down to the chase: “Would we sail on the Norwegian Sun again?” The answer is a resounding: “YES!” Please sit back and read on to see why.

I bought this cruise through an internet auction firm. That was a first for me. The only details I had were the ship’s name, itinerary, sailing date and the fact that I was bidding on an inside cabin located somewhere on the ship. The whole process was over in 20 minutes and I saved a bundle. When the deed was done, I started seeing scam stories on television involving internet sales and auctions. For a while there, I was afraid I had been defrauded. That was definitely not the case. We received our tickets about 3 weeks before sailing, at which time we found out our cabin was on deck 8 aft, also known as Viking deck.

We always choose an inside cabin as a matter of preference because my wife needs more sleep than I do. No daylight ever reaches an inside cabin. People brag about their balcony cabins. I am so glad they enjoy them; it leaves more inside cabins for us. We would fight the cruise company tooth and nail if they tried upgrading us to an outside or balcony cabin again. We’ve been there, done that and she hated it with a passion. Being in an inside or outside cabin doesn’t cause me any joy or sorrow.

The trip from Montreal didn’t start well. Upon arrival at Fort Lauderdale airport, we discovered all our luggage (3 suitcases holding 130 lbs of our stuff) had been sent to the Dominican Republic. We did have a few items of clothing at our Fort Lauderdale condo, but nothing that would allow us to get dressed and go for dinner on the ship. We had flown a day earlier than embarkation. We were promised the luggage would be waiting for us at the ship the next day. Yeah right! If you believe that, I’ve got lovely farm land for sale that I could show you at low tide. We slept our condo and packed a fourth suitcase with whatever few items of clothing we had left behind last winter. We then headed for the stores bright and early to buy a few essentials. You guessed it: the luggage wasn’t waiting at the cruise terminal, as promised by the airport staff.

Embarkation on the Norwegian Sun was a breeze. There was no waiting in a cavernous hall like cattle, or anything that even remotely ressembled that. We had requested that a wheelchair be waiting for us at the terminal and there it was, by the terminal’s front door when we got off the Avis shuttle. We reluctantly gave our one suitcase to a baggage handler, fearing that this one might be lost too. Someone was assigned to push the wheelchair through the terminal, quoting safety regulations. We proceeded to the registration counter where our passports and tickets were checked. We were photographed for security purposes and an imprint of my credit card was taken. Our cabin’s keycards were issued. A lost baggage report was completed. Everything was extremely efficient and courteous. Meanwhile, NCL’s terminal supervisor contacted the airline to locate our lost luggage.

We were then whisked onto the Norwegian Sun in no time flat. An hour later, the terminal supervisor left a message on our cabin’s voice mail stating that the luggage had been found and would be delivered to the ship 3 days later, on Wednesday. The travel industry keeps quiet about the fact that luggage travels much more than its owners. Lending a suitcase to friends who travel less often than us only partly explains that discrepancy.

The ship is nicely laid out, well appointed, very clean, with bright and airy public areas. Most of the greenery adorning the ship is fake but not dollar-store stuff, so it hardly shows. You have to move in close to realize that. If you sail on the Norwegian Sun, please remember that the most efficient elevators are those located forward and aft. Each of the four glassed-in elevators inside the ship’s atrium holds a maximum of 6 or 7 adults. Everyone wants to ride those. They are always full and typically stop at every floor. The atrium is the heart of the ship and many public rooms and services are located around it. You might need to ride the forward elevators often. You’ll get to your destination quicker if you avoid the atrium’s elevators and use the forward elevators, located 25 feet away from the atrium’s elevators.

Our cabin, No. 8127, was located aft roughly 75 feet from the four aft elevators. We thoroughly enjoyed its roominess. Please bear in mind we’re talking about a cruise ship cabin. Roomy ashore and roomy on a ship aren’t the same. The closet space was more than adequate. In addition to the queen size bed, we had a comfortable sofa, a desk and chair, small night stands, a safe and a refrigerator. There was even enough leftover space to park the wheelchair out of the way. The cabin’s door snaps back behind you tighter than Tupperware and managing to keep the door open while wheeling the wheelchair out was a feat worthy of Cirque Du Soleil. Make sure you have your room’s keycard in your pocket before you even touch that handle.

The cabin’s shower is your typical cylindrical phone booth where you can soap yourself up and spin against the walls for a quick wash. It was nonetheless very efficient and one never runs out of hot water on a ship. All in all, the bathroom was small but very efficiently organized. Towels and washcloths were meted out with exacting retenue, to the point where we felt we would need a notarized statement, should we require an extra washcloth.

The housekeeping staff (Aivanka and Jerry) kept that cabin squeaky clean at all times. We wanted to bring them both home with us when we left. They were very helpful in procuring us with a large ziploc bag for my wife’s ice treatments at night. We had packed some ziploc bags before leaving home, but they were circling the globe in our luggage at that time. We obtained the extra ice we needed from room service at the end of each evening.

As you may have guessed, my wife is not as mobile as she once was. Her condition may stabilize, but it won’t improve. Traveling with a wheelchair was a new experience for us and will become the norm in future cruises. She will own a power chair by the time we cruise again. A word on power chairs and scooters for people with reduced mobility: for safety reasons, only devices powered by gell cells are allowed on board NCL ships. Every time we got to a dining room, someone would take charge of the wheelchair, help her move from the wheelchair to a regular chair, park the wheelchair and repeat the process in reverse when we left.

The dining room staff on the Norwegian Sun is most personnable. Although the ship’s Freestyle policy isn’t conducive to building a rapport with your waiter and busboy, we still enjoyed the attentive service we received in the dining rooms.

Speaking of Freestyle, we thoroughly enjoyed the concept. Our last cruise lasted 10 days, out of which 7 nights were the evening’s dress code was either sports jacket, shirt and tie or formal. I work in a suit and tie and it’s a refreshing change to be able to go for dinner every night wearing what NCL calls “casual resort wear”. That was a big plus for me.

Big item here for most cruisers: FOOD. Before we boarded the ship, I had read reviews where people compared the food in various venues on the ship. In my view, one may not realistically compare the Great Outdoor Café with the Garden Café, the dining rooms, the speciality restaurant’s cuisines and Room Service. To me, it’s just not logical to compare these various options. They just aren’t the same.

The Great Outdoor Café’s food is truly informal and great once in a while, specially if you are in a rush or if you feel a sudden yearning for a hot dog or hamburger. One step up from that is the Garden Café, where you can pick up truly nice food in a very pleasant, air-conditionned environment with a view. You may even take your tray to the pool deck or the Great Outdoor restaurant. They are all connected. The Seven Seas and the Four Seasons dining rooms are very nice and, understandably, serve more formal dishes than the cafés.

Another step up from the dining rooms are the specialty restaurants. We tried the East Meets West (asian), Le Bistro (french), Il Adagio (italian) and Pacific Heights (californian) restaurants. The overall dining experience in these 4 specialty restaurants can only be described as truly superb and well worth the cover charges. There is no cover charge in the californian restaurant.

One of the ship’s best kept secrets is the Las Ramblas tapas bar located in a quiet corner of the ship, on deck 12 aft. Unless you go exploring, you may very well miss it entirely. The room’s atmosphere is intimate, lighting is subdued, soft spanish instrumental music is piped in when musicians are not present and they close the blinds after the sun sets. They serve delightfully spicy, warm or cold spanish tidbits every night, free of charge and without reservations. We enjoyed a pre-dinner drink and tapas there on 4 separate occasions. Try to experience Las Ramblas early in the cruise. You’ll be back often.

We did not go to the show every night but the shows we saw were truly entertaining. Most memorable were Elvy Rose’s two shows. We had seen her on the Norway in 1996 and we were delighted to find her again on the Norwegian Sun. We also saw a magician’s act (I forget his name) that was very good. He bills himself as “The Misfit of Magic”. His act is a cross between a stand-up comic and a magician. The Jean-Ann Ryan reviews were enjoyable and seemed a bit more elaborate than previous reviews we had seen on other ships. The addition of an olympic gymnast among the cast spices things up quite a bit. Their performance of Cirque Pan was a bit busy, and loud for my taste but my wife enjoyed the show tremendously. I must have been tired that night. The “Encore, Mr. Producer” review was also very well done.

The ship’s photographers will take pictures of you at every possible opportunity. If you plan on purchasing them, let them take all they want. In any case, you are under no obligation to buy anything. However, don’t buy them before the last day of the cruise, where you can take advantage of the White Elephant sale and buy every picture they ever took of you for a flat rate of $100 (if I remember right). If you are photogenic, had a lot of pictures taken and want them all, that’s a good deal. This time around, we were spared having a costumed pirate put a plastic sword to our throat while we smiled for the ship’s photographer. As Martha would say, cocking her head to the side: “It’s a good thing”.

Any liquour purchased on the ship will be kept in storage until the last night of the cruise. Any liquour purchased ashore will suffer the same fate upon returning to the ship. You may try smuggling some liquour on board in your luggage at embarkation but I don’t know if the bottle will reach your cabin before being impounded.

I purchased the all-you-can-drink soda card on the first day of the cruise ($27.50) and found it to be a good deal if you drink sodas. You’ll see a lot of people walking around with bright red metal Coke cups. Be warned that the bar waiters who refill these cup will process a drink purchase before a soda refill. They make 15% on the drink purchase and I don’t know if they get anything from the drink card sales.

We had purchased a good-quality set of walkie-talkies to keep in touch with each other on the ship. They would only work if both of us were on deck. We have seen other people using the same kind of walkie-talkies without any difficulties. The Gods decided to laugh, I guess.

After lunch, towels get scarce in the pool area. That’s understandable. Women are way more creative then men when using towels. By the time they used two towels to cover their chair, made a pillow, a sarong, a turban, dried themselves and stashed one in case of emergency, 7 towels bit the dust. All that will go into the wash at lunch time and the odds are good that the same number of towels will be used in the afternoon. There’s no way the ship’s laundry can keep up with such intensive usage. If you have an afternoon excursion where you need to bring a towel with you, you had better go get it early in the day and keep it in your cabin.

Having a Columbian Emerald International store right there on board the ship was a bit of an overkill. You can’t cast a stone in the islands without hitting one of those stores and now there is another one of these places, right smack in the middle of the ship. Is NCL afraid someone will slip into a gemstome-purchasing-withdrawal syndrome during a day at sea? Enough with C.E.I., already!

One thing I truly hated occurred in Ocho Rios (Jamaica). The ship docked at the old, decrepit Mineral Dock when less than ¼ mile away from there lies a brand-new, apparently safer, modern cruise ship dock, where RCI’s Explorer of The Seas berthed. There was room left for us there. Docking fees must be significantly lower at the Mineral Dock. If you head into town on foot from there, as I did, you are confronted with wave upon wave of harmless, unusual-looking and extremely persistent locals offering you whatever it is they have for sale. I didn’t mind, as they are basically non-threatening. I swear if I had purchased marijuana everytime it was offered to me, I would have needed a green garbage bag and a porter to bring it all back to the ship. One must also contend with the many purveyors of services of a more personnal nature. We didn’t encounter this kind of thing before when we docked in Ocho Rios at the other, more upscale dock. All we faced there were nice self-employed ladies who offered to put beads in our hair.

Debarkation was even brisker than embarkation. We had made our own travel arrangements to return to our Fort Lauderdale condo. We were scheduled to leave the ship around 9:30. We had just finished breakfast in the Four Seasons dining room when our colour tags was called. It was 8:50. We made our way to the gangway. They swiped our room keycards one last time. We waved goodbye to the cruise director and BOOM! we were in the terminal, waiting in line to meet the nice folks at Immigration and then Customs. Security reasons be damned, noone was available to help me with the wheelchair. At this point, I was pushing my wife’s wheelchair, while pulling along a train of 5 pieces of luggage weighing about 180 lbs behind me. If I could have simultaneously balanced a dinner plate spinning at the end of a stick on the tip of my nose, I would have been hired by a chinese circus on the spot.

All in all, cruising on the Norwegian Sun was a pleasure and we’d do it again in a minute. The next time I feel the irresistible call of the sea, I’ll be just a few clicks away from bidding on another cruise. Happy cruising and smooth seas to you all.

Sylvain Forest
E-mail: lourspolaire@yahoo.com

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